From New Poems (2000), "signs" Summary

One can relate the second poem in this book to the first, in that the whole world has gone wrong. The title "signs" may refer to a biblical allusion to "signs and portents," again in relationship to the end times, when "signs" point the destruction of the world. In the first stanza, birds start to walk and crows stand right in the road watching the destruction, because things are dead and of course crows feast on the dead things. Even geese, which normally take flight in the sky, stand on the side of "highway 95," one wing and the other pointing in each direction.

The second verse links these birds to a man who bolts from his car, barely clothed, rushing into traffic, his arms outspread just like the geese in verse 1. He is...